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Genuine value differences are real, but surprisingly often they're not the source of political disagreements, at least on a surface-level analysis.
Consider rent control: (some) leftists think it improves affordable housing availability. (Most) rightists think it does the opposite. Leftists and rightists may place different amounts of value on the availability of affordable housing (and do, to a limited extent, though I don't most rightists are actually opposed in principle), but is that core to the disagreement? If a leftist could be convinced that rent control actually harms their terminal goals (as a good chunk have), then the question is resolved with no value shift.
Consider BLM: there's that infamous survey where a good chunk of BLM supporters said they believed that the police kill not ten unarmed black men each year (roughly accurate) but ten thousand. If I thought that I'd be right there beside them! I'm less confident they'd change their mind if they heard the right number -- being that wrong suggests near-total scope insensitivity -- but the actual fact of the matter can change minds.
There's a lot more: rightists think that housing-first homeless assistance programs don't work, that safe injection sites increase overdose deaths, that gay couples are much more likely to abuse their (adopted) kids, that racial achievement gaps in education can't be solved by shoveling money at inner city schools. Leftists think that Christianity is false and harmful, that permitting hateful speech will inevitably lead to genocide, that adding highway lanes increases traffic, that universal healthcare would dramatically reduce costs. I think a reasonable person on either side of the isle, were they convinced of the other side's claims of fact, might switch sides on any of these issues.
It's definitely worth considering whether the factual disagreement is just cover for a values disagreement -- who was it that noted that people who think that torture would be morally unacceptable if it did work are much more likely to believe that torture doesn't work? -- but I don't think it always is. Now other questions, like abortion, are much closer to genuinely irreconcilable value differences; at least, the Thomson-level pro-choice advocates wouldn't be swayed by learning fetuses are fully conscious/have souls/can feel pain... But why worry about those hard disagreements when we can't even solve the easy ones? Well, we have solved some of them: they stop being political issues when every agrees, so you just stop hearing about it. But there's still plenty more out there.
I'm not sure that's true, there's a pretty common phenomenon where upon learning what should be good news people instead respond with hostility and anger. Like telling people that data centers aren't really that heavy on water consumption or that food prices are actually cheaper than ever or that home ownership rates is actually around historic levels, or that children starving in the US isn't an issue anymore or that welfare fraud is actually a relatively negligible issue compared to the overall budget or whatever else.
Now some of the anger could be from a "I think you're lying and I'm mad that you are lying to me and denying a serious issue", but I think some of it is reflective that the particulars don't matter to begin with, it's the vibes that matter. You don't actually need immigrants to be 64% of murders (yes this was a real claim spreading on X) to have the vibe of "outsiders bad". You don't actually need to believe that ten thousand blacks are killed by police each year to have the vibe of "fuck the police". And you're harshing the vibe for pointing out the actual statistics and facts, so fuck you.
Well, yes, this is definitely a real effect. Actually, I was confused when I first read this comment; I thought you were replying to my other post. The question is how common the effect is, and what it would take to overcome. I started with rent control for a reason: there's a decently large contingent of leftists who have given up on the idea. Not the populists, but I don't think I've seen a serious defense of rent control from the wonk/YIMBY/urbanism side for... a decade? Well, I'm sure it exists, but my impression is that it's a lot less popular in those circles than it used to be.
... But outside of those circles? Yeah, there's a frighteningly large proportion of people who are incapable of or totally unwilling to understand frequency and base rates, or just the concept of a tradeoff. I've got no idea how to close that gap.
(I genuinely don't understand how the AI water meme even got started. How could someone simultaneously be so disconnected from reality as to believe it's a real problem and well-informed enough to know about evaporative cooling in datacenters in the first place? I understand how it spread; it's one of those claims that's just too good to check if you already hate AI for the normal Luddite/antislop reasons. But where did it come from?)
Well the YIMBY/urbanism side understands, by definition, that the issue is supply based and thus rent control isn't really an effective solution off that.
I will go to bat and say I don't think rent control is as bad as people think and it's at least partly selection bias. Rent control doesn't have much political energy when homes are being built and rent is going down. Rent control comes about when rents are going up rapidly, which means already terrible conditions. It compounds a bad problem to make an even worse problem, but the issue is still fundamentally lack of supply and bureaucracy. And new rentals will still get built even in predicted negative rent environments, so if builders can tolerate an expected -1%yoy in rent, they should be willing to tolerate +3%yoy rent.
That they're willing to build even when rents are expected to be lower long term is the biggest sign that builders want to build, and they're just being prevented. And all the places with rent control are well, the places that don't want to address the real issue so it's a great little sign of "don't come here to rent control city, we think government should control your property and we will never ever allow you to build anything new"
Take a real issue (data centers need to consume water)
Unaware of your bad faith or not you misinterpret it out of context making a mountain of an ant hill because you're against the very concept to begin with
Other people hear it and start repeating it because holy shit that mountain is scary, and for something I'm already against anyway?
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The core of the disagreement is that those on the right believe the landlord owns the property and the tenant rents it, whereas those on the left basically feel the tenants own the property and the landlord is an employee who maintains it for them. This is typically covered up by a lot of verbiage, but the rhetoric from the left is sometimes quite clear on this point.
And leftists don't care if any of that is true, they want them anyway. That's the conflict-theory explanation, anyway.
The conflict theorist would say no, would point to evidence, and would point to faked evidence of the opposite from the other side. If the other side is willing to falsify their claims of fact, those claims of fact are not the reason for the belief. In fact, I (a conflict theorist) suggest that a good deal of the reproducibility crisis is caused by researchers using their scientific know-how not to find the truth, but to produce "evidence" for political reasons.
There are committed conflict theorists on both sides, yeah. And they're the loudest voices. But why would they bother with arguments-as-soldiers if no one could be convinced by arguments? I think there are reasonable people whose opinions can be swayed by fact -- I'd like to think I'm one of them -- and, while the information environment for any politically contentious topic tends to be bad, it's not completely intractable.
How large that population is is an open question, and, I imagine, membership is rather fuzzy: there's a wide range of cognitive biases towards preserving one's existing beliefs that mistake theorists can fall prey to, and extreme conflict theory -- on the level of fabricating evidence to support policies you know don't help your cause -- might just be the endpoint of that spectrum. But I can't think of an easy way to determine the shape of that distribution, so maybe it really is mostly conflict theorists. But I don't think so.
Orwell explains this with the word "duckspeak":
The arguments are source material for the duckspeak.
The main arguments which actually work are the the argument from personal benefit, argument from authority, and the argument from force. Including social approval and disapproval for those last two.
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But they both agree on the most important thing: 👏no 👏new👏 housing 👏
One of my favorite memes I saw this month:
THE LEFT: "don't build new units/homes, it won't even lower the cost of housing"
THE RIGHT: "yes it will, and that's why it's bad"
NIMBYs and the right aren't the same -- in suburban area, lots of NIMBYs are on the left. And the left doesn't say "don't build new units/homes", they say "build only affordable multi-family housing with no parking". The right (even most NIMBYs) would be fine with greenfield development of market-rate single family homes, but the left has been smart-growth, anti-sprawl, New Urban for a long time and has completely taken over planning decisions, so we get this. Slow recovery from the 2008 crash, some excitement from COVID, and but then capped at a historically low level. The right opposes subsidized housing, though they can't do anything about it, but subsidized housing doesn't help the people who are complaining.
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